Enterprise WLAN Market Continues Moderate Growth in 1Q19

The combined consumer and enterprise WLAN market segments increased 6.9% year over year in the first quarter of 2019, finishing at $2.4 billion, according to IDC. The enterprise segment grew 7.1% to reach $1.4 billion while consumer market revenue increased 6.6%, finishing at $1.0 billion. The market is being driven by enterprises continuing to upgrade their wireless infrastructure as users and devices rely on an increasing array of bandwidth-heavy applications.

The enterprise WLAN is now dominated by the 802.11ac standard, which makes up 86.4% of dependent access point shipments and 93.1% of enterprise WLAN dependent AP revenues. The next iteration of the standard, 802.11ax also known as WiFi 6, will increase in the market throughout the rest of 2019 and into 2020.In the consumer WLAN market, the 802.11ac standard accounted for 58.0% of shipments and 79.2% of revenue in 1Q19.

From a geographic perspective, the enterprise WLAN market saw its strongest 1Q19 growth in the Middle East & Africa region, which rose 23.8%. The Western European region grew 10.8%, while Central and Eastern Europe rose 1.6%. The Asia/Pacific region (excluding Japan) grew 2.4%, ant the United States market grew 11.8%.

Cisco saw its WLAN revenue increase 11.6% and their market share came in at 46.8% in 1Q19, up from 44.3% in 4Q18. Aruba-HPE revenues rose 20.3% while their market share stands at 14.1% in 1Q19, up from 12.6% a year earlier. Ubiquiti revenue increased 17.8% year over year in 1Q19, accounting for 7.3% of the market. ARRIS/Ruckus revenue fell 27.6% while market share stands at 5.2%. After the end of 1Q19 (April 2019) CommScope completed the purchase of Ruckus Networks' parent company, ARRIS. Huawei revenues grew 9.3%, giving the company 4.2% of the global market.